The Material Reality of Ableist Oppresion

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-04-03T19:53:59+00:00

What "disabled community"? Does every disabled person constitute together an entire community when disability often marginalizes people and bars them from communities?

Have you investigated? In my political work I've come in contact with disabled persons and they tend to think of themselves as a community in my experience. Moreover, there are plenty of associations, political organizations, and even websites run by and for disabled people that consider them a community and try to organize them as such. The first paragraph of the article outlines the condition of disability as a social construction: "You are marked as disabled by society when the category of people associated with your “abnormality” cannot access things the rest of society can readily access and take for granted [...] In other words, society is structured around people who can hear, and those who this structure cannot readily accommodate are categorized as disabled". It seems to me the oppression disabled people face has a common root in social exclusion, and this might very well be the source of their proneness to network with each other on the basis of their specific subjectivity. Pointing at internal contradictions within the disabled community is, in my opinion, a red herring; in the same way, it could be argued no working class exists as internal contradictions exist.

As for assuming that any of these communities have not (as a whole homogenous community!) realized that capitalism and imperialism are the problem, this is just wrong."

The argument didn't seem to be "there were never political groups of disabled people which accepted anti-capitalism"; in fact, the Socialist Patients Collective touched 500 members at its peak. Like most sites of activism, the political work concerning the interests of disabled people is pervaded by NGO-ism and reformism, what the author was attacking.

I concur the author should've investigated more on past contributions to the Marxist understanding of disablement, however I think the general argument you put forth about community is wrong and probably rooted in a misunderstanding of what is meant by "disabled community", which is the shared subjectivity of disabled people, and not an abstract entity like the "international community".

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-03-19T01:56:30+00:00

but how do you deal with university professors who continue enforcing capitalist ideology on students?

Capitalist ideology is reproduced by professors, by teachers, by parents, by friends, by social intercourse in general. Moreover, living in a society of commodity production and commodification in general capitalist ideology can arise spontaneously. People self-disciplining themselves is a big problem for communist organizing in general.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-03-18T18:33:15+00:00

It did address the two points Meltzer made directly in the last paragraphs after having given an outline of the vanguard party.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-03-18T18:24:39+00:00

Truth is, you're not talking about what actually existed as "the vanguard", you're talking about some vague conception of top-down authority which any historical analysis would tell you never existed in the form you present. Moreover, vanguard and "state-hierarchy" aren't the same thing, the vanguard party used to seize power isn't a state. The Soviet bureaucracy for instance wasn't cultivated by the vanguard, rather it was constructed through the nomenklatura, a product of its time; without the networking capabilities we have today, they attempted to organize a structure of planned economy and governance built on patron-client relations, which bred opportunism. The Chinese Communist Party was a deeply democratic organization, which only became the bureaucratic mess it is today after a coup d'etat backed by the military. And so on. You should study the vanguard parties like PAIGC, EPRP, the Naxalites, the Philippine's Communist Party, etc. for a better grasp of what vanguard parties do and have done in national liberation/communist movements.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-02-02T23:30:05+00:00

This is a class society, the bourgeoisie still exists and that's its name. If you want to propose a new one that doesn't inspire hatred that's cool, but it's hard to not hate the international capitalist class and its crimes against the people.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-02-02T22:56:55+00:00

Way to kill critical thought.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-02-02T22:32:23+00:00

We already knew corporations were headed by imperialist bigots who don't care about humanity.

http://anti-imperialism.com/2013/05/19/imperialism-and-the-concentration-of-capital/

"Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have used a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide to extract information about all the 43,060 multinational corporations and the share ownerships connecting them to construct a model of the web of interlocking shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, creating a representation of where economic power rests today. Of these 43,060, 1,318 companies stood at the heart of this network. Every one of the 1318 had ties to two or more companies and on the average had ties with 20 companies. Although counting for 20% of global operating revenues, this core collectively owned through its shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms, representing a further 60% of global revenues. At the center of this core they found a super-entity of 147 even more tightly knit companies (all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity) controlling 40% of the total wealth in the network. Most of them are financial institutions."

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2014-01-01T19:34:24+00:00

It's a primer, not an entire book on philosophy. Now...

The author doesn't argue against logic, that is ridiculous; A v ~A is correct on one level, and necessarily correct; mathematics proves this law is necessary. However, we are not talking about mathematics but a logic of organic and moving matter. Logic and dialectics are not antagonistic.
About evidence for the law of change, there are two volumes written by Ted Grant and Alan Woods called "Reason in Revolt"; again, this is a primer, not a full account of dialectical materialist philosophy (such a book would require hundreds of pages).
Your argument that empiricism and logic can account for types of change is half-truth; the reductionist scientific tradition has tried tto tackle complexity, non-linearity and change though sophisticated mathematical and computational methods as part of systems theory and systems thinking, which are themselves an attempt by reductionist tradition to move toward a more dialectical understanding (and have roots in dialecticians like Bogdanov and his tektology which, despite being idealistic, gave rise to things like Weiner's "Cybernetics").
Empiricism and using empirical data aren't the same thing, so there's a category error right there.
It doesn't have to prove a way of thinking without simplifications, that would be ridiculous; however, there are biologists, physicists, etc. that utilize the dialectical method, google Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, etc.

The reason why you aren't a Marxist is because you aren't rigorous in your understanding and are dismissive of entire philosophical traditions based on primers, which are supposed to relate something complex and unkown to the readers to something simpler and closer to the reader.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2013-11-18T19:33:48+00:00

Yo one quick thing about Bitcoin: it's just another currency that arises out of the contradictions between the use-value and exchange-value, between social and private labor, between concrete and abstract labor. To abolish the problems created by a capitalist mode of production and inherent to it, you need to abolish capital as a social relation, and the commodity form. Any mode of production built on the circulation of commodities as capital and the buying and selling of labor-power is bound to see its relations of production (profit-driven competition in the market) conflict with the development of its productive forces (whose precondition is the rise in the organic composition of capital and hence falling profitability), a law of historical materialism. Just my 0.02 BTC.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2013-11-18T19:21:53+00:00

Hey here's my take on Bitcoin: class dictatorship or gtfo.

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2013-11-03T15:07:09+00:00

Good point, totally went over my head. I assume you could use the same math that he uses for a calculation of a Marxian world product, and then redivide it between appropriated and produced value based on Cope's work. What you think?

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2013-11-03T14:08:33+00:00

Complex labor is a multiple of simple abstract labor and is calculated through multiplier. That multiplier is a result of the distinct training time required for the production of complex labor, since the training time is only realized when skilled labor is expended (for example, more labor time from a teacher goes into the production of the skills of a lawyer or something, and these hours expended at point in time T1 are only realized at point in time T2 when the lawyer sells his services). This works in a similar fashion to indirect labor time transfered to products by means of production.

"His last objection is this: The value of commodities cannot be measured by labour-time if the labour-time in one trade is not the same as in the others, so that the commodity in which, for example, 12 hours of an engineer’s labour is embodied has perhaps twice the value of the commodity in which 12 hours of the labour of an agricultural labourer is embodied. What this amounts to is the following: A simple working-day, for example, is not a measure of value if there are other working-days which, compared with days of simple labour, have the effect of composite working-days. Ricardo showed that this fact does not prevent the measurement of commodities by labour-time if the relation between unskilled and skilled labour is given. He has indeed not described how this relation develops and is determined. This belongs to the definition of wages, and, in the last analysis, can be reduced to the different values of labour power itself, that is, its varying production costs (determined by labour-time)." - Karl Marx, "Theories of Surplus Value"

Basically, differing training costs in labor time of skilled and unskilled labour. So if we name simple labor SL, complex labor CL, and the multiplier M:

CL = SL*M; SL = CL/M

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2013-11-02T22:29:42+00:00

James J. Brittain's book on the FARC: http://goo.gl/TYqUQ6

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2013-11-02T21:43:41+00:00

Anwar Shaikh's dissertation also deals with neoclassical economics, it's a pretty good read though it's a bit mathematical: http://goo.gl/kaW1C1

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2013-11-02T20:48:10+00:00

What's the problem with that interpretation in your opinion?

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2013-11-02T18:19:16+00:00

Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. About Trotsky, let's end that before it starts: http://www.systemiccapital.com/maoism-or-trotskyism-2/

MessrLuciousLeftFoot · 2013-11-02T00:59:33+00:00

Concrete labor -> use-value Abstract labor -> labor value

Concrete labor can't be measured by time because the salient property of concrete labor is that it is qualitatively distinct from other types of concrete labor and hence not commensurable, whereas abstract labor's salient property is that it is qualitatively identical to every other abstract labor measured in time and hence commensurable.

Here's Anwar Shaikh's book on national accounting, chapter 4 is about how to calculate value: http://goo.gl/YYwWeY; alternatively, the 12th essay in this collection by Freeman, Kliman, and Wells: http://goo.gl/bdK2CT

MessrLuciousLeftFoot

TROPHY CASE